Why can’t I use a Credit Card Directly? It’s So Easy Compared to Learning this Bitcoin thing.

We would really like to accept credit card too, in fact, analytics shows that most people leave if they can’t immediately pay by credit card.

The issue is we are banned by Paypal, we are banned by Stripe. We can get credit card gateways on the checkout, but they are just soft patch problems that will get us banned from them too.

For 2 years we accepted credit cards directly, but it’s getting harder to find things that work.

So why is that?

It’s pretty simple our products are classed as pharmaceuticals or pseudo pharmaceuticals no matter how benign, or actually over the counter or easy to get. It is considered high risk.

Whats high risk? It means that there are a lot of fraudulent sites doing this kind of thing. Merchant gateways don’t like fraudulent sites because 1) they can get sued and 2) they stand to lose money if the fraudulent site gets a lot of chargebacks.

Update 8/9/2016: It turns out after more rejections and research that Big Pharma has been actively working with Visa, Mastercard and Amex to shut down any websites not approved by them selling anything that could be pharmaceutical in nature.

So this comes the underwriting part, it’s like insurance. No sane merchant gateway will underwrite a website like ours, simply because of the categories of products.

The payment gateways are not being evil, when you use a credit card online , it is the same as using it on a credit card processing machine in a normal shop. The credit card processing machine requires a merchant account which has to abide by strict rules to protect the credit card company and by extension the consumer.

Ironically many of the products actually appear on websites like Amazon.

Big companies like Amazon get away with this problem because they have a great balance sheet and generally can sell whatever they want, whilst small companies like ours will be trying to use all sorts of methods to make it work, but ultimately be jumping from one gateway to another.

You see this problem on other sites, they are either counting on not being discovered or using some shady payment gateway from China.

So sooner or later this is going to be an issue, whats more regulations on the internet are becoming stricter meaning that companies like ours are going to get squeezed out because we can’t afford special treatment.

So this is where cryptocurrency or digital currency comes in. Digital currencies circumnavigate the problem, by not needing a card processing facility in the first place.

BUT I like my Credit Card because it is Safe. How do I know you won’t Scam Me?

Of course, that’s exactly the reason why the merchant gateways don’t like us in the first place, because of the consumer protection.

The consumer can go to them and complain about us, in which they will end up losing money.

The issue isn’t people like us, but people who run entire websites to do hundreds of fraudulent transactions than disappear, these websites tends to be websites that sell health solutions, dating sites, gambling sites and so on, but unlike us they don’t provide real product. The only goal for them is to do credit card fraud.

We have been around for 2 years, our records are public. There is a lot of records of our presence in the past 2 years in our blogs, forums, feedback on the internet.

We have refunded customers 100% when the product has failed to arrive or failed for other reasons and with Bitcoin. We will guarantee a 100% refund on dissatisfaction.

Ok, How The Hell Do I Buy Stuff with Bitcoin. My Body is Ready…

Circle is the easiest for USA and UK. There is a mobile app, and you literally scan the QR code at checkout to pay from your bitcoin wallet(more on the wallet later).

Most of the time, the exchange site WILL ALSO serve as the bitcoin wallet. (Will explain more about the wallet later)

I’m Tired of This Shit, Get to The Point – How Do I Buy the Bitcoins?

So after you checkout, you will be given 3 hours to pay with bitcoin.

To pay with bitcoin you need to transfer into the address provided. The address provided is our websites wallet, so you are transferring from one wallet to another wallet. Bitcoin addresses are just numbers and letters and look like this:

They can also be translated into a QR code for easy payment, e.g. scan using Circle app.

We have reviewed the list of sites available to pay by credit card, and come to the conclusion as of 28th July 2016:

Buying Bitcoins in the United States:

The United States is unique in that Bitcoin regulation is much higher than other countries, this means that the sites usually require some form of verification. The ones that tried to avoid have been taken down.

Coinbase – Great mobile app, can pay credit card. Best all around website, interface and lovable mobile app.

Buy Bitcoins with Cash:

I have Bitcoins Now How do I Pay?

After you checkout you will be given a unique address, that’s our Bitcoin wallet. You just press send on whatever service you are using, and copy and paste the address to the “TO” section, with the EXACT Bitcoin amount:

If you have a digital wallet on the phone, you can just scan the QR code and make the payment immediately. The QR code contains the address and the amount of Bitcoins needed.

What’s a Bitcoin wallet?

If you are interested in Bitcoins. Bitcoin wallets are like bank accounts that store your currency digitally. All your bitcoins are data. The two best wallets are the ones which you can also have on your phone.

They are Blockchain, Coinbase and Circle. With these, you can also download an App on your phone which allows you to buy stuff online by scanning the QR code.

You can use these accounts to STORE bitcoins. It’s also good to store your Bitcoins with a big organization like Blockchain to ensure they don’t go missing.

To transfer bitcoin money to your wallet, you just need to find your wallets address and copy and paste that into the send form on the other Bitcoin account/wallet.

Most exchanges serve as wallets also, but if you want convenience it’s good to use something like Coinbase or Blockchain so you can access your Bitcoins on your phone.

You can also store bitcoins on things like memory sticks or your own computer using Electrum, but that’s more advanced and not advised for people who don’t know what they are doing.

What can I use Bitcoins for?

We are not the only shop who accepts Bitcoins. There are often discount for using bitcoins, and lots of online shops have slowly begun introducing Bitcoin.

You can search for these, but a prominent site called purse.iogives 15% discounts in Amazon as long as you buy with Bitcoins.

Bitcoins are also predicted to grow larger, (with predictions of up to 10% of the market) so their value can go up, some people see Bitcoin as investments.

Bitcoins are also safe from the prying hands of debtors who may be looking at your bank accounts.

On Checkout I get Forwarded to Coinpayments.net What is That?

Firstly make sure you click the Bitcoin icon to select bitcoin .

Coinpayments.net , is the website where we store OUR bitcoins, and where our wallets lie. They facilitate the payment by sending confirmations to both parties to make sure we know when we got our payment.

What is a Bitcoin Confirmation?

Bitcoins need to be confirmed by multiple computers for each transaction, so it can take anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour to be confirmed. This is the entire process of how Bitcoin works and why it doesn’t need a bank.

The bank’s responsibilities are shared among all the Bitcoin miners online, in return, the miners get Bitcoins as the reward for processing and confirming the payment.

Confirming the payment also solidifies the transfer, so nobody can deny that it happened.

Why is Bitcoin So Unpopular?

Because you have to write instructions like the above to make sense to the normal consumer, and it’s mostly done in a way with no consideration to the average consumer making it hard to take off.

Why is Bitcoin Being Regulated? Why can’t it Be SIMPLE like a Credit Card or Paypal?

Because the governments know it can be used for money laundering or fraud due to the natural anonymity of the Bitcoin payer, credit cards create records tied to your bank account, Bitcoin’s address is anonymous.

By regulating and asking people to verify their ID, it ties the person’s information to that bitcoin address. So instead of the government asking MasterCard, for example, it will now ask Coinbase.

This really isn’t a problem as most people are not fraudulent and are just paying for goods and services, HOWEVER as a bonus side effect for the big banks it makes buying Bitcoins more cumbersome, which keeps the big banks going.

What is so Special About Cryptocurrency?

You see the main appeal of cryptocurrency is that it can operate without the need for central banks, meaning no more monetary control by financiers and the same types on wall street.

The credit card processing bit is very expensive and costs the providers and the retailers a lot of money every step of the way. Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin removes all the need for the middle people currently making millions from processing charges.

This is why the government and big boys are very laser focused on making Bitcoins hard to use. –

But hopefully technological revolution cannot be easily stopped and the future will be one where people can just do what they want to do with THEIR money and buy what they want to without the middlemen.

Why should I buy using Bitcoin from you, when I can just buy from Amazon?

Because we use the money to keep researching and providing more useful information and products to people in need. You can read our values and principles.

We are small and just make very little money, we have no intention of getting big and capturing the attention of the masters of our little planet.

If we don’t get support from the people we are trying to help, we will just have to close sooner or later because things don’t run for free.

I wish we could do it. I wish we inherited lots of money and can just run this as some kind of charity, but I am not. This is our dream project, so we want it to work and keep finding new chemicals but we have to deal with reality too – rising rents, rising food prices, we all face these issues.